FW: [Chiba-users] new feature: loading subforms

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Joern Turner [mailto:joern.turner@googlemail.com] 
Sent: Monday, June 08, 2009 2:08 PM
To: chiba-users
Subject: [Chiba-users] new feature: loading subforms

We have integrated a new feature into Chiba that i consider interesting to all XForms power users. In our current Chiba 3 branch we have integrated support for loading subforms into already running forms by using an extension to the standard XForms <load> action e.g.

<xf:load show="embed" target="targetIdRef">
  <xf:resource value="'mysubform.xml'"/> </xf:load>

will load the resource 'mysubform.xml', initialize it and embed it into the current form by replacing the element denoted by @target. All lifecycle events that normally occur for a form will be fired during init of the subform to allow proper setup. We've also implemented a variant of the load action that allows unloading of the form. We're still evaluating the best syntactical alignment with the XLink standard to express all use cases but the actual (un)loading code works quite fine and stable.

Motivation:
we have a project that has to support a very complex schema that allows hundreds to thousands of combinations of certain structures.
These can even be nested into arbitrary depths. It wouldn't have been possible to code all those combinations into one form in a static manner. This would have resulted in forms with ten thousands lines of markup - not very pratical from a memory usage and parsing time point of view.

There's still some polishing to do until it's ready for final rollout but the new load/@show="embed" will be definitely part of the final Chiba 3 release and IMO improve the scalability and maintainability a lot.

Comments welcome.

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Received on Tuesday, 9 June 2009 16:21:49 UTC